Contributors

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Hey pallies, just wanted to let all you Dinoholics know that 4 tracks from the stellar new Dinotrib Dinoalbum bein' released on August 14 are now available for your Dinolistenin' pleasure at the offical Dino myspace music site. Just click on the title of this post and start groovin' to the sounds of Dino and company. The four songs are "Ain't That A Kick In The Head," with Kevin Spacey, "Arriverderci Roma," featurin' Tiziano Ferro,, "Who's Got The Action," with Big Voodoo Daddy, and "Baby O," featurin' Paris Bennett.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Hey pallies, like dudes there is a great new site on the web that is devoted to our Dino and the girls that surrounded him on the Dinoshow, variously called "Dean's Girls, The Golddiggers, and The Ding-aling Sisters. Click on the title of this Dinopost and you will enter a Dinowonderland of Dinopixs and Dinocommentary on the cuties that sang and played with our King of Cool during the nine year run of the Dinoshow, plus the Golddiggers were also a Summer replacement series for several of those years as well. Hope you enjoy minin' the Dinogold at this great new Dinolocation!

Friday, July 27, 2007

Hey pallies, just click on the title of this Dinopost to go to the offical Dino myspace music site where you will find a Dinopoll inquirin' which Dinoproduct you would most Dinodesire to acquire. Looks like the pallies at EMI on gettin' on the Dinoball and preparin' to launch a series of Dinotrib Dinoitems so that we can make our Dinodevotion much more Dinopublic....now how cool is that. So wander on over to the Dino myspace music site and make your Dinointerests known!

Crooner Dean Martin and comedian Jerry Lewis staged their first show as a team this day in 1946 at Club 500 in Atlantic City, NJ. Actually, the two had met while performing -- separately -- at the Glass Hat in New York City and decided to try an ad-lib act together. The rest is entertainment history.

The duo went from earning $350 a week to $5,000 a week in under eight months, with Martin playing the romantic straight man opposite Lewis as his goofy, unpredictable partner. Ten years later, the curtain came down on their final team performance at the Copacabana in New York. Over that decade, the zany two made seventeen movies including My Friend Irma, That’s My Boy, The Caddy, Pardners, Jumping Jacks and The Stooge.

Dean Martin went on to become a recording star (Memories are Made of This, Return to Me, Everybody Loves Somebody), movie star (The Young Lions, Rio Bravo, Sons of Katie Elder, the Matt Helm series) and host of his own TV variety show, The Dean Martin Show. Lewis pursued a solo career in Hollywood as comic lead (The Sad Sack, Cinderfella, The Nutty Professor); director (The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, The Patsy, Family Jewels, Which Way to the Front); producer; teacher (USC); and consummate entertainer. It would take 20 years for the two to speak publicly with each other again.

Martin died December 25, 1995. Lewis continues to set records in fund-raising during his annual Stars Across America! Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (he has been chairman of the MDA since 1950). The Las Vegas resident continues to make nightclub appearances and returned to the stage in the Broadway revival production of Damn Yankees in 1996. Critics called his performance as the Devil, a rip-roaring success. This commentary courtesy of the web site Capitol Hill Blue.

Hey pallies, like for some crazy Dinoreason, I just can't get this Dinovid to transfer from youtube to the ol' Dinoblog, so just click on the title of this blog post to see a great clip of our Dino and the jer singin' "Side By Side" with wonderful footage from their 10 years together. It was on this date in 1956 that Dino ended his partnership with the jer, which began on July 25, 1946. The Dino and jer team lasted exactly 10 years....now how cool is that, but then our Dino does everythin' so Dinoperfectly!

Friday, July 20, 2007

Hey pallies, this looks like proofs for the Dinotrib....Dean Martin: Forever Cool......they may reject the proofs for their poor quality, but they will never reject our Dino.....truly Dinoperfect in every Dinoway!!!! So lookin' forward to the August 14 release of this great new Dinoproject!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Hey pallies, found this posted at myspace from the official Dean Martin web site. Pallies, like just click on the title to take the quiz....I'm off to do it now! Let's find out how Dinocool we each are!!!!!

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Hey pallies a dude named Matthew R. Bradley has written a way cool article 'bout our Dino's Matt Helm flicks for a mag tagged "Cinema Retro". Do hope you will enjoy this very Dinoinformative and Dinoenlightin' piece of Dinoliterature....and pallies check out all the great Matt Helm pixs that are included is this groovy Dinoprose. All ya need to do pallies is just click on the title of this blog post.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Hey pallies, our good Dinopallie Jeremy has just posted an awesome post over at his "Moon In The Gutter" blog on the Dinoflick "Showdown" that also starred Mr. Rock Hudson. This is an extemely well researched and well written review of this Dinowestern and I would encourage you to click on the title of this post to enjoy Jeremy's great Dinoprose. And, thanks to our pallie Jeremy for his Dinoinspired Dinopassion in furtherin' all of our Dinoeducations!!!!!

Hey pallies, I just totally groove on this Dinotribute for the offical Dino myspace homepage, so am postin' it here for our Dinoedification. Keep that Dinolight glowin' Dinobright!

Quick: name the artist, who (a) knocked the Beatles from the top chart position at the height of Beatlemania; (b) scored a gold record in 2004 with his fastest-selling album ever, which also hit the iTunes Top 5; (c) was worshipped by Elvis Presley; and (d) is heard regularly in the hippest movies, TV shows and commercials. Need another clue? Playboy recently called him “the coolest man who ever lived.”

Of course that man is Dean Martin. Dean’s importance to generations of music fans (not to mention aficionados of masculine cool) now far outstrips his former reputation as the tippler of the Rat Pack or Jerry Lewis’ crooning straight man. Simply put, he was a great singer – the warm sensuality of his voice continues to beguile – with a winning style and just a touch of mystery.

“He was the coolest dude I’d ever seen, period,” recalled Stevie Van Zandt in his liner notes to the 2004 compilation Dino: The Essential Dean Martin, adding, “He wasn’t just great at everything he did. To me, he was perfect.”

His childhood was anything but. An immigrant barber’s son, Dino Crocetti greeted the world in 1917 in Steubenville, Ohio. He spoke only Italian until age five and quit school at 16. His early autobiography is as gritty as that of any hip-hop star – he delivered bootleg liquor, served as a speakeasy croupier and blackjack dealer, worked in a steel mill and briefly ruled the ring as boxing phenom Kid Crochet.

Winning his share of bouts earned him little apart from a broken nose, but Dino’s speakeasy experience put him in contact with club owners, resulting in his first singing gigs.

With a fixed nose and a boost from his pals in the nightclub underworld, he became Dean Martin, styling himself after the top male vocalist of the time, Bing Crosby. He later began singing with the Sammy Watkins Band and enjoyed moderate success on the East Coast; in 1943 he joined Frank Sinatra at New York’s Riobamba club.

1946 was a banner year for Martin. He released his first single, “Which Way Did My Heart Go?,” and was first paired with comic Jerry Lewis. The two shared a bill at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, but the night they combined their acts into one combo platter of manic, ad lib-heavy comedy and debonair music saw the birth of a phenomenon. They were the hottest ticket around and parlayed their onstage success into a string of hit movies and headlined a hugely popular series of TV appearances on the Colgate Comedy Hour.

During Martin and Lewis’s decade-long partnership, Dean had such hits as “Memories Are Made of This” (#1, 1955), “That’s Amore” (#2, 1953), “Powder Your Face With Sunshine” (#10, 1949) and “You Belong to Me” (#12, 1952), among others, all for the Capitol label. Yet when their partnership dissolved in 1956, conventional show-biz wisdom predicted that Lewis’ star would continue to ascend and that Martin’s would fizzle.

The singer, however, confounded the skeptics. By the end of the ’50s, he was wowing crowds at his solo shows in Vegas, impressing critics and audiences in a series of dramatic film roles (including The Young Lions and Rio Bravo), scoring on TV with the first of several “Dean Martin Show” specials for NBC, and hitting the charts again with “Return to Me” (#4, 1958) and “Volare” (#12, 1958).

By the early ’60s, Martin’s affiliation with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and the rest of the fabled Rat Pack supplanted his earlier rep as Lewis’ suave, warbling straight man. He fueled his image as a boozing playboy in onstage antics with his pals and ring-a-ding ensemble films like 1960’s Ocean’s 11, yet Martin later claimed his cocktail-swilling persona was largely a pose. His greatest offstage love was golf, which necessitated retiring early and rising with the sun.

Though he left Capitol in 1961 to sign with Sinatra’s fledgling Reprise label, Martin capped his tenure at his first record company with a bang. 1960 saw the release of two singles, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” and “You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You,” that arguably show him at the height of his powers: playful, romantic and confident.

In 1964, with the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” perched atop the singles charts, teen girls screaming through their tears at guitar-wielding bands and magazines pondering the British Invasion, Martin reasserted himself with typical aplomb. Promising his son he’d have a #1 song, he proceeded to knock the Fab Four from their dizzying perch with the buttery anthem “Everybody Loves Somebody.” Several other hits, including “The Door Is Still Open to My Heart” (#6, 1964), “I Will” (#10, 1965), “Houston” (#21, 1965) and “Send Me the Pillow You Dream On” (#22, 1965), followed during his years at Reprise.

Though he continued performing throughout the ’60s and into the ’70s, Martin’s visibility was greatest in films (such as the campy Matt Helm spy franchise) and on TV, where he nursed his lush-in-a-tux image with the long-running “Dean Martin Variety Show” and the hugely successful “Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roast” gag fests.

In recent years Dean Martin’s star has shone ever more brightly. And more than 40 years after knocking the Beatles out of the #1 spot, he continues to enthrall music fans. In fact, his effortless vocalizing has become a modern shorthand for cool, as evidenced by the use of his songs in films like Goodfellas, Casino, Swingers, Out of Sight, L.A. Confidential, A Bronx Tale and Payback, not to mention TV’s “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing” and commercials for the 2005 Nissan Altima, Microsoft, Marriott Hotels and Heineken, among countless others.

But the phenomenal sales of Capitol’s 2004 collection Dino: The Essential Dean Martin – which collects his key recordings for both Capitol and Reprise – provided the strongest signal yet of Dino’s continued prominence in the pop-music firmament. Billboard’s “Hotshot Debut” was the week’s highest-charting new entry, and has sold more briskly than any previous Martin recording, going gold within months and now certified platinum status within a year. What’s more, the disc hit the Top 5 on Apple’s iTunes Music Store album chart. As Bill Zehme observed in a 2004 Playboy profile, “Dean provides smooth, winking succor to generations anew.”

In 2006, Blender Magazine ranked 1992’s Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, as the #1 Rock n’ Roll book of all time. Biographer Nick Tosches described Martin as a classic menefreghista, Italian for “one who does not give a f---.” The term, in Dean Martin’s case, conveys not indifference but a refusal to be beaten down by the world – and a determination to greet life with an easy smile, a graceful melody and an aura of unflappable cool.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Hey pallies, what a cool Dinovid for the 4 of July....if our Dino was elected governor of any state...that's where I'd move in a heartbeat. Have never seen Ada...but gotta find it as soon as Dinopossible!!!!